Justice, Diplo

Last night, Ryan and I got to see Justice perform at the Showbox SoDo, and it was awesome. I am a big fan of the phenomenon of two French dudes making sweet, sweet techno musics. Daft Punk's Alive 2007 album is one of the greatest albums ever made and the performance on the eponymous tour completely blew my mind. Justice is well on their way to living up to the very high standards set by their quasirobotic predecessors.

This was the second Justice show I'd seen, the first being this past October at Neumos, and I had some rather high expectations going in. Neumos, for those unfamiliar with Seattle's Capitol Hill concert venues, has a tendency to be full of shoegazers and other low-energy wankers even at the most energetic of shows. Which is unfortunate and also highly puzzling when the crowd for a show like Ratatat somehow isn't rocking the fuck out from the moment they start till the moment the house-lights come back on. But Justice at Neumos almost brought the place down. I was at the back wall and there was not a single stationary person there during the entire show.

I had never been to the Showbox SoDo before, and was unprepared for the experience of walking in and being surrounded, surrounded, by tools. Its like there was some kind of tool convention of which I was unaware and it was being hosted by Justice. Also, it was a type of tool I'd had only glancing previous experience with, the tool who looks and acts like a stereotypical frat guy who's trying to be a hipster. Most unsettling.

The Fear was beginning to rise until Ryan pointed out that the show was part of the Myspace Music Tour. Ohhhhhhhhh... *that's* what that is. While I'm all in favor of bands getting the word out and networking and all that good stuff, the cultural trappings of the Myspace phenomenon can fuck right off.

So things start off with the opener, Diplo. Wow, talk about unfulfilled potential. Diplo seemed to have a talent for building some rather excellent soaring, almost symphonic melodies and then utterly destroying everything 4 measures later in favor of 4 minutes of boring thumping beats. What the Fuck, Diplo? First of all, pick a style and stick with it. Second of all, if you are going to break up your melodies, you can't just ditch them entirely. Keeping some element of the previous section is required if you want people to think that you're doing something other than flipping the crossfader from left to right and calling it a mix. Third, pick a style and stick with it. I realize this is the same as first of all, but its such an important point I thought it was worth mentioning twice.

Needless to say, Justice wiped all of this from my mind the moment they started. Where their show at Neumos had been relatively similar to their album, this show overall seemed to take a serious hint from Alive 2007 and mixed things up in a serious way, pulling both new and unexpected, stylistically, samples into the mix as well as sections mashing up two of their own songs into beautiful new hybrids. It was just an audiovisual assault of excellence, from start to finish. My favorite mix from the October show made a reappearance and I was simply overjoyed. The party mixed over Master of Puppets. I had a pretty serious Metallica thing in high school, and this song just makes me happier than i can explain. If anyone knows where I can acquire it, please, please let me know.

Thank you France, for once again putting two of your dudes together for the purposes of making sweet techno. The world is a better place for it.

Tags: music, seattle